From The
Healing Cross: Interpretation of Life by Herbert H. Farmer (London:
Nisbet and Co. LTD, 1938).

"Behold
therefore the goodness and severity of God"

CRUCIFIED UNTO THE WORLD

"The
cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified
unto me, and I unto the world."—Galatians 6:14 (R.V.)

THESE
are exceedingly strong words, and I suppose they could only be uttered with
sincerity by one who, like the Apostle, has reached a superlatively
high level of Christian character and discipleship. Yet that only
makes them the
more worthy of our consideration. In our spiritual journeying, as in other
forms of journeying, we have to set our direction by the mountain tops
or by the stars. It is precisely because they are above our heads that
they are qualified
to direct our feet.

I

What
does the Apostle mean by the world? It is not unimportant to ask this question,
for the word is often misinterpreted and misused by religious
people.
Deep and central in the Christian outlook is something which we call
the renunciation of the world,
something which is irreconcilably opposed to a spirit which we call
worldliness. But what is this world which must be renounced, this
worldliness which
must be opposed? Quite certainly it is not a matter of not permitting
ourselves
to be interested in, to delight in, this world considered as a work
of the Creator. Nothing could be farther from the mind of Paul than
that.
To be
crucified to the world did not mean for Paul to cease to delight in
all the order and
beauty of natural things, the light of setting suns, and the round
ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and the green earth.
Writing to
the Romans
Paul said, using the word "world" in this other and more
genial sense, "the invisible things of God since the creation
of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that
are made, even His eternal
power and divinity." There is no thought in these words of being
crucified to the world, any more than there was in the mind of the
Master when He delighted
in the beauty of the flowers of the field.

Nor
again is the world, or the spirit of worldliness, to be identified with the
genial pleasures of human life and society. That there is
a danger in the
more immediately and superficially pleasurable things of life is,
of course, a commonplace. Pleasures so swiftly become ends in themselves.
But it is
certainly not the Christian view to lump all delights, even the shallower
and more frivolous
delights, together, and label them
as being "of the world." This is only worth saying because such
misconceived notions of worldliness still linger on in many of our
consciences, or what we think to be such, even though we repudiate them in
our minds and
by our deeds. When Paul speaks of being crucified to the world, it
is all too easy for the mind to be clouded to the searching thing he is saying
by a vague
picture of an emaciated anchorite fleeing on his spindle legs from
all the dear delights of life and calling others to do the same. Such ideas
of the
Christian spirit are utterly remote from, are indeed gross caricatures
of what the Apostle is thinking of—utterly remote from the mind of Christ.

What
then is meant by the world? John has given in his first epistle a definition
which is assuredly not far from the mind of Paul. He
says it
is "the
lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of life." What
exactly John meant by these phrases, and what illustrations he
would have given from the life of his own time, it is impossible
to say. But in a general
way
the matter is clear. It is a question of the inner motives and
desires which actually dominate and set the direction of the life
whatever may be its merely
external poses and professions.

II

The
desire of the flesh: what is that but the continuous, subtle pull of the
body on a man's conduct,
swerving again and again, without his knowing it, the whole
direction of the life—all the body's instinct after
comfort and self-maintenance, and away from pain and hardness
and self-denial ? A man has not conquered the body
merely because he is not troubled by its grosser appetites,
or because now that his income is less he cannot pamper it
so much. Even to loll in an arm-chair
when one ought to be somewhere else is, when all is said
and done by way of excuse, the lust of the flesh. The body,
like the devil, is a past-master in
the art of disguise. He is not the ass St. Francis declared
him to be. He is subtle. And in these days, perhaps even
more than in the days of the Apostle,
he rules the lives of men. One of the keywords of our modern
civilization is comfort. Another is "keeping fit." We
speak of a rise in the standard of living. But what is the
standard?
Do we mean a rise in men's capacity
for high thinking, noble giving and austere self-control?
Not at all. We mean almost wholly and exclusively a rise
in the standard of comfort.
The word is symptomatic of our whole attitude. It is the
pull of the body. It is active
all the time.

And
then the lust of the eyes: what is that but the deep-seated impulse of acquisitiveness,
covetousness—the desire to
grasp as much as possible of the good things which this
life immediately offers, and which we can see
other people striving after all around
us? It is the lure of the immediate, the subtle thought,
which we hardly ever put into explicit terms, but which
is not the
less operative
for
that, that
after all we pass this way but once and unless we grasp
all we can of what is now visible and within our reach
we shall
miss
so much.
The attitude
can be observed in a crude form in children. A bright and
glittering object
is
presented to the eyes and the hand instantly goes out to
grasp. Countless adult folk have never really got beyond
such an infantile
attitude,
though they may
exercise it in a more refined way. There comes an opportunity
to acquire some glittering object, and without more ado
it is seized,
with little
or no thought
of any moral and spiritual implications. One of the troubles
of our time is the way in which people, directly they get
money, will
spend
it on
whatever they may desire, without any consideration of
the economic and social consequences
of what they do in the lives of others. They just see a
glittering thing and
go after it. It is the lust of the eye.

And
then there is the vainglory of life—the self-conceit,
the desire for praise and deference, the delight of being
thought an important and significant
person, of wielding power over others, of being in the
lime-light; all the empty vanities of fashion and custom and title and office
and uniform and
status, the little snobbish impostures into which men
tumble before ever they are aware
of it. It matters not that our
circumstances are narrow, the stage on which we play
our part small and hidden. It matters not that we know
in our
heart of
hearts
that when
we come before
God it will all avail us nothing. The mean little ego
will still have us out on our stage, prancing and strutting
and posturing,
even though
he
be the only
spectator.

Why
then does the Apostle call all this sort of thing —the lure of the
body, the covetousness of the eye, the pride of life—the "world"?
The word "world" conveys the idea of organized
power, something larger than the individual in which
the individual is, and by which he is
continually influenced and shaped. This is important.
We have not seen the real problem
of the moral and spiritual emancipation of men, until
we realize that the desire of the body, the desire
of the eye, and the
vainglory of life are
a world in
this sense. These distorted visions, false ambitions,
wrong ideals, impostures and unrealities, have constructed
a social
organism in harmony with themselves
which begins at once to bind and shape every new life
which is born into it. That is what makes the problem
of our regeneration
so difficult. All
the time
we are being subjected to the influences, so subtle
and unnoticed many of them, of a society, a world,
built up on these perverted
values of comfort
and acquisition
and vain-glorious reputation. You thrust it out of
your being at one point, and it has crept in at another.
Quite
plainly, to get a man out of this world or system,
to emancipate him from all these false values, is going
to be a tremendous
operation. It will
need to
be drastic, violent, decisive. We have only to look
into
our own hearts
to know that.

III

The
greatness of the problem, the drastic vigour of the emancipating act, if
it is to break through
such systematized
and ingrained
illusions, is
reflected in the word Paul uses—crucified!
I am crucified to the world and the world unto
me. We have not in our modern English a word
with something of the
grim and crashing absoluteness of this word "crucified." "Crucified" signifies
the last and most irrevocable degree of mutual
separation and repugnancy. It signifies, too,
something of the violence required
to bring about that
separation.
To pass from the fundamental spirit of the world
to the spirit of Christ is not a matter of easy
growth, gentle transition,
natural evolution. It
is not
a matter of polite and mutual tolerance, an agreement
to differ, as gentlemen should, on one or two
more or less important points.
It is an uprooting,
rending, tearing, splitting and breaking, surgical
operation kind of thing, a mutual
crucifixion, with nails and spears and agony
and death. We do not easily think in these days
in
such violent metaphors,
but there is truth in them.
There
is nobody who
knows his own heart, and the kind of values which
rule the whole structure of our civilized life,
who does
not also
know that
we shall never be
saved into anything like the mind of Christ
by gentle and beautiful exhortations,
eloquent appeals to our better nature, church
services however glorious, courses of moral exercise
however
cunningly devised.
Something more
violent is necessary—more
shaking, more surgical, more calculated to make
a man start away in a sort of recoil from himself;
something which he can come back to again and
again.

That
something—the Apostle's tremendous words suggest—is
given in the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

I
set the Cross with its physical agony alongside the desire of the body—my
love of comfort, my continuous excuses for
avoiding anything which may spoil that comfort. I set the
Cross with all the
naked and outcast poverty of it,
the running out of a glorious life in premature
death for the sake of a distant vision, beside
my desire of the eye, my instant,
childish itch to grasp any
visible good thing, to enlarge and expand
my present state, my fear to let the immediate delight go
for a remoter and uncertain
ideal, my subtle and
permeating acquisitiveness. I set the Cross
with its loneliness and shame alongside the
empty vanities with which my beloved ego
decks me out, even if it be only on the little stage
my situation allows me. I
remind myself that this is
He whom
I call Lord and for a moment, at least, I
see myself as I am. I despise myself.

And
this also I see with overwhelming clearness, that it was the desire of the
body, all the
subtle lure
and pull
of it
towards comfort and
self-preservation, the desire of the eye,
the grasping, greedy, thoughtless acquisitiveness
of men for the goods of this life, the
vainglory of life, which crucified Him.
Many years ago there was a picture in the
Academy
entitled, "Were you
there when they crucified the Lord?" In
the centre was the Cross, and all around
it was a crowd of modern folk symbolizing
in various ways
the perverted
values which rule our modern life. I was
there
when they crucified the Lord. I helped
to do it.

Every
man should carry, if only in the pocket of his mind, a crucifix, and should
train
himself when need
arises to
take it
out and look
at it. When
the lure of the body, the desire of the
eye, the
vain ambitions of the heart are
stirring within him, let him take it
out
and read written under it, "So
you were there when they crucified the
Lord."

IV

Yet
that is not all. Our emancipation from the world, our cleansing from
its false
values, is
not complete,
touching
the deeps of
our being, if
we are forced
merely to a detestation of ourselves.
When we have
faced the question, when we have
been constrained to answer in a bleak
moment
of sincerity, "I was there when
they crucified the Lord, I am there
when they crucify the Lord," what
then? Well, if we are hearing God's
word to us in the Cross of Christ,
it would be well to hear the whole
of it. We
are not meant to ignore the prayer
that rose out of His mighty spirit
for those that crucified Him—"Father,
forgive them, for they know not what
they do." Was that prayer unanswered?
Is it not rather the divine spirit
of forgiveness itself, which in its
very condemnation, by its very condemnation,
is seeking to heal? And dare we
not think that there was another
prayer, prayed later even for Judas
when he cried, "I have betrayed
innocent blood,"—" Father,
forgive him, for he now knows what
he has done."